Category: Featured Posts

Welcome to Season 3 of Outlander! Once again, Leigh Dyrda and I will be sharing recapping duties two episodes at a time. I’m reviewing episodes 1-2 below, and then Leigh will be back in a couple of weeks with a review of episodes 3-4. But first, a quick recap: The final episode of Season 2…

In the summer of 2017, a handful of towns in England celebrated the bicentenary of Jane Austen’s death by hosting a project called Sitting with Jane.[1] Sitting with Jane is an art trail featuring twenty-four Austen-themed book-shaped benches in public spaces. While most of the benches are located in the Basingstoke area—the project’s home base—a…

The three of us (Devoney Looser, Caitlin Kelly, and Melinda O’Connell) worked together to co-edit Jane West’s A Gossip’s Story, and A Legendary Tale (1796), a novel that has been described as a starting point, if not the inspiration, for Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811). West’s novel, like Austen’s, centers on two sisters, one…

I spent the month of June 2016 at the Huntington Library, combing through its archives for items related to my book project on revision and the eighteenth-century novel. Some of these items were the work of Maria Edgeworth, an important late eighteenth-century novelist and education writer. The Huntington has 77 letters by Edgeworth, almost all…

Chapters 21-30 of Charlotte Gordon’s Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and her Daughter, Mary Shelley examine the relationship between authors’ biographies and their fiction, their romances, and their partnerships. While this segment of the book includes deeply intriguing criticism regarding the writing process and the ideal romantic partnership, Gordon has several disconcerting…

Location: Finger Lakes Musical Theatre Festival, Nazareth College Arts Center, Rochester, NY Event Date: July 13 – July 24, 2016 Review Date: July 21 and July 22, 2016 To the possible surprise of many readers, dramatic adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels have a long history, dating back to the 1890s and proliferating throughout the twentieth-century.…

Welcome to our first Behn’s Badass Bibliotheque summer book group post! Alaina Pincus, general editor of ABO Public, and Shea Stuart, 18th Century and Pop Culture section editor, discuss His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik, which is the first book in her Temeraire series. The novel is a fantasy set during the Napoleonic Wars in which…

In honor of the supersize Outlander finale, it’s a supersize review for ABOPublic. I’ll try to move briskly but we have a lot of ground (and time) to cover. While watching the final two episodes, “The Hail Mary” and “Dragonfly in Amber,” I was actually reminded of Episode 5 “Untimely Resurrection,” where Jack Randall marvels…

Like those of many figures profiled on ABOPublic, Hannah Cowley’s story has lain neglected for too long. History naturally changes when you restore to it personalities that helped to shape it but have been largely overlooked. The restoration work is difficult when the subject in question stood in the shadows of her time. The historian’s…

The opening scene of “Prestonpans,” episode 10 of Season 2 of Outlander, has Claire standing next to the ravaged corpse of a Scottish warrior as he lies gently in repose against a felled tree. As the dappled light of the forest surrounds them, Claire quietly contemplates the number of men she’s seen killed in war.…

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Announcements

Are you participating in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)? Writing about the 18th century? Share your work with us! We’d like to feature 18th-century-themed original fiction for the month of November. Submit a synopsis of your work and a 750-1000 word excerpt to lstuart@gardner-webb.edu. Your novel could be featured in a special NaNoWriMo post.

Editor’s Notes

When I first volunteered to work with our parent journal, ABO (which was then stillAphra Behn Online), I had a smattering of web design experience and the belief that the academy was ready to stretch beyond the paperbound paradigm that defined the best scholarship. I was lucky enough to work with two talented and passionate…